This is really disappointing. Anyone have any more educated thoughts on this possibly? I think it brings a horrible aspect of gamer culture to vanilla that didn't exist back then with people peening over scores and finding more reasons to exclude others.

Sorry I shouldn't have pretended everyone knows what it is. Raider.io was a site that functioned with an addon to track your dungeon history. What dungeons you've done, if you beat the timer or not, if you cleared it or not, etc. and this resulted in a score that dictated whether people using the addon wanted you in their group or not. It's like evaluating people based on gear score but worse.

I really hope this doesn't make it to live. It really skewers a lot of community from the game imo.

i do not think that people will really care about this. I mean in BFA it is important that people know the dungeons for M+ because it is times but in classic there are a few dungeons that takes under an hour for a casual or pug group so it really does not matter that much.

i do not think that people will really care about this. I mean in BFA it is important that people know the dungeons for M+ because it is times but in classic there are a few dungeons that takes under an hour for a casual or pug group so it really does not matter that much.

I'm hoping you guys are right in saying that veterans won't care about this shit.

The problem is streamer culture is ALLLLLLLLLLLLLL about this e-peen bullshit and I worry that might make it commonplace somehow.

I sure hope it either doesnt get used much by the community or blizzard breaks it somehow. Its a decent metric for pugging high keys if you are playing on a high level. But it has a negative effect on the lower end imo.
That said I wonder if it would be better if there wasn’t an armory like for retail. So people couldn’t go “checking armory” when forming groups.
Of course they could still inspect eachother ingame, but that suddenly makes it much more personal wich I would prefer.
I do have faith that classic wow will sidestep most of these problems as the way the game plays and how server populations are more intimate will encourage people to form bonds and group with friends, or take a chance and be more patient with “noobier” randoms ( that have the potential to become friends ) skill or gear be damned, because thanks to a lack of automated grouping tools, the alternative would be potentially spending more time looking for another group member that meets your standards. Potentially wasting more time than showing the new guy the ropes to help smoothen the run.

The thing with Gearscore or Raid.io is that those addons are developed because the game changed from:
"2 hour Dungeons runs with enough time to explain everything and drink mana after each encounter"(vanilla)
to
"If you do not have x Gearscore(ilvl) for this boss we will not make it because it is a total Gearcheck"(WotLK)
to
"OMFG you missclicked your stun now the M+35 will never happen because we have a time buffer of 5 Seconds".(legion)

I can understand why those addons are so popular because most people do not have a good guild or the right one and have to pug everything.

I do wonder what people want to prove when using this addon, since Classic is not a version of WoW that even comes close to cater to this behavior. There are no heroic versions of a dungeon or raid and clearing a dungeon in a faster time also won't give any better rewards. I will certainly avoid grouping up with people boasting about their wondrous feats with this addon.

That being said, these kind of addons wouldnt work in Classic because your pool of players is too small most of the time. You cant be a chooser when forming a group allready takes a considerable amount of time. Also knowing people is a real option.

In Classic you would need some kind of rating addon based on player feedback. Like "rate your tank" stuff. Problem with that is how easily it could be abused and how useless the data is unless a large portion is using it. So wont happen either.

In my opinion the real interesting topic is whether we may see certain ratings/addons being adopted by individual realms but rejected by others.

Kicking and replacing someone pre raids is reserved for insufferable social behaviour. I cant think of 5 man content that couldnt be cleared by 4 people carrying a fifth. Personally I would see it as a challenge, even though that person may end up on my not invite again list.

So how the fuck do you time a DM East run for instance - cause there's a jump skip with all sorts of variations on that, or a tribute run cause there's also variations on that depending on the group composition. Mara princess run you can just rush to the end boss without a problem, but most people will do 1-2 bosses besides princess for reasons. Let's not even kid ourselves with all the types of BRD runs.

No, an addon like that is outright stupid. Anyone who's going to use that as a metric of judging other players' ability to play is not a good player.
Gear score has very little to no relevance because itemization in vanilla is all over the place. A level 40 green item could beat your level 60 blue item because of a +SP stat on it, have fun ranking every GS for every item and every build for every talent point you have with an add-on. It's one thing to theorycraft what the BiS is and another thing to theorycraft how good every item is against every other item with how Vanilla itemization works.

If someone made a gearscore addon that is not based on ilvl but rather a predetermined class specific ranking, I dont see why that wouldnt work. Like every notable item gets a score from 1-10 and the average score of your gear equals your gearscore. Maybe with some weighting towards more important slots and other slight adjustments. You would still be left with oddities like resistance gear which can range from bis to useless depending on the encounter... but overall such an addon would certainly work in theory.
And to be honest, I would like an addon that rates gear. I wouldnt want it to rate players - but for a classic scrub like me seeing whats good and what isnt without intensive research would be a blessing.